- The company doesn't do DevOps and most teams are lucky to deploy once a month. This painfully slow cadence means each release is extremely high stakes, leading to a lot of stress and tension; it also means critical fixes and performance improvements languish for weeks or months, or until their absence prompts an emergency serious enough to bypass the normal change process
- Engineering is not empowered to make decisions; this varies somewhat from team to team, but by-and-large engineering teams are expected to be order-taking -- tech debt is generally not taken seriously, which leads to fragile and unmaintainable systems, prompting embarrassing performance and stability problems. Instead of prompting self-reflection from Product leadership, this usually triggers a blame game which rolls down to engineering
- New management pushed out all the good middle and some senior managers who helped build Medidata's positive culture; the new leadership is secretive and remote, and credible rumors of outsourcing abound